Thank you very much. I had not been aware that
it's been five years since I met Doug! It is definitely a pleasure for me to be
here, and for Paul also. We often say to ourselves often that educators are the
most important people in our society today. It's always an honor to speak before
you, and I hope that our message has meaning to you.

A Culture of Powerlessness

I want to start with a contrast that shapes
all of our work at the Center for Living Democracy. It is this: We live in a world
that is characterized by incredible power. Since I was born in 1944, I've seen
the power of technology and science to penetrate outer space, the power of science
to unravel the mysteries of the genome, the power of communications to, in nanoseconds,
link us to people around the world.

Incredible power characterizes this era, and
yet, in truth, most of us feel increasingly powerless. It is an era of enormous
material power, and yet incredible social powerlessness. A billion of us, perhaps,
live without even the most basic, primal power to meet our need for food and to
take care of our offspring. The rest of us feel increasingly powerless to affect
the most basic aspects of our lives, to protect ourselves and our children from
violence, to secure healthy food and water for ourselves, to secure jobs that
have some security. Increasing feelings of powerlessness pervade our lives.

Now, what do we human beings do when we feel
powerless?

Well, a lot of us whine! Paul and I drive to
the airport frequently, too frequently. On this drive we recently noticed a big
billboard advertising Rush Limbaugh. Guess what the call letters are of the station
of Rush Limbaugh in our area? WHYN radio. A lot of us whine. When we feel powerless,
what do we do, we complain a lot.

Unfortunately for us human beings, we also
blame a lot when we feel powerless. Whom do we blame? We blame government, them
"up there" in charge, or them "below." We blame the immigrants in California,
as Proposition 87 suggests. We blame welfare, we blame them...

What else do we do? In many ways we're all
like kids, we learn that saying no gets attention. So we say no a lot. To me,
the past election was a giant exercise in stamping our feet and saying no‹those
guys, we want them all out, they're all bad. No, they're in charge, no. Reject
them. We throw a fit.

And yet another response to feelings of powerlessness
is simply to retreat. To believe that, while there's no way that we can have an
affect in the larger world, we certainly can try to secure meaningful private
relationships, to have a meaningful family life. So we retreat into private life,
and certainly all the messages of our culture are telling us that that's where
the rewards are.

Out of this whining and blaming and rejecting
and retreating, we are creating and living within a culture of powerlessness.
And this feeling of powerlessness stands is such stunning contrast to the enormous
sense of material power all around us.

Why Top-Down Strategies Can't Work

Now, that's not the worst part! Let me go a
little further in setting the stage that informs all of our work at the Center
for Living Democracy. We believe that, if we took the time, sat for a long time
and talked about the nature of today's problems, their depth, their complexity,
their pervasiveness, if we took that time we'd probably conclude, at least we
would, that they simply cannot be addressed by top-down strategies.

Hierarchical top-down measures are failing
to solve the highly complex, highly-interrelated social problems we face today.
These problems can't be solved from the top-down because they require such enormous
creativity, such extensive changes in our behavior. Whether we're talking about
the environment, or about AIDS, poverty, violence, education‹solutions require
that we tap the direct experience of those most intimately connected to the problem.
They require the creativity, the ingenuity that comes from having directly experienced
the problem. Perhaps most important, they require the commitment to solutions
that are only there when we know we've been part of designing those solutions,
the buy-in factor which doesn't exist in a top-down model. There has to be "ownership."

In a sense, this outlines the terrible predicament
we're in: While solutions require vastly increased engagement to draw on that
experience and knowledge >from direct encounter with the problem and the commitment
that comes that involvement, in fact we live in a culture of powerlessness where
people feel increasingly disengaged, disconnected. All we know what to do is whine,
blame, reject, retreat. And this predicament says a lot about the challenge to
educators.

What would it mean to educators, both inside
and outside the classroom (I believe that in one sense every human being is an
educator because we educate all those around us by who we are as human beings),
is we understood our job as directly addressing the culture of powerlessness?
What would it mean, how would we operate differently?

Re-thinking Power as Relationship Building

We believe that the answer has to begin with
rethinking the very meaning of power. Power, although it has five letters, is
one of those distasteful "four-letter words" in our culture.

We tested this out on a number of people. And
a teacher friend of ours asked students, "what is the first association you have
with the word power?" Wow, she was bombarded with negatives. Bully, guns, Hitler,
parents‹negatives in the eyes of many students. And we ask our audiences often:
what is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "power?" They
respond with many similar words but they add: money, and a lot of the women throw
in "men."

One other little anecdote. A teacher friend
of ours asked her students to line up in the room in descending order of how much
power they thought they had. Every student wanted to be last in line! The students
didn't want to acknowledge that they had any power. Power is a dirty word. It's
something that means corruption. That's another typical association of power‹manipulation,
control, evil.

Now, if we're in a culture of powerlessness,
and we think of power as evil, how are we going to get beyond our powerlessness?
How are we going to become powerful if we're afraid of it, we think it's bad?

A lot of our "teachers," those people around
this country whom we are learning from, and who are really the basis of our book,
The Quickening of America, those people who are discovering their own power and
transcending this culture of powerlessness, they have taught us a great deal about
power. It is not something outside of ourselves, it's not something attached to
simply money and official status. In fact, power is best understood by returning
to its Latin root‹posse, to be able.

Power is the capacity to create. And once we
begin to think of it that way, we see its inherently social nature. Power exists
in relationships. All power is a relationship, whether it's in a concentration
camp or in a community or in a family. Power exists in a relationship. The action
of one will affect the action of another. Once we begin to see power as a relationship,
we begin to understand that no matter how much less power we feel we have, we're
never utterly without power. There's always room for movement, room for creativity,
room for our action to change the nature of the relationship.

If we begin to think of power in a very positive
way, how do we create it? What is the next step? How do we go beyond this rethinking
to actually address this empowerment challenge? How do our schools, our classroom
practices, our curricula reinforce feelings of powerlessness, or on the other
hand, enable students and ourselves to gain power?

Not Callousness as Much as Powerlessness

Now, before answering that question, which
is the heart of my talk, let me take a sidestep to make explicit a bedrock assumption.
Many approaches to educational reform, currently, are based on the assumption
that at the core of our social problems is a moral breakdown.

So we need to be educating "better people."
We need to be teaching sensitivity. We need to be teaching caring for others,
renewed ethic of service‹as now we see mandatory community service becoming part
of more and more college and high school curricula. Now, of course, all of this
greater sensitivity, greater feelings of caring about others, all of this is a
very good thing.

But our approach assumes that much of what
we now perceive as callousness isn't arising simply because we've lacked proper
training to make us more caring. Much of what we now perceive as insensitive self-seeking
may result >from feelings of powerlessness. Back again to how I began: When we
feel powerless, we point fingers and blame at others, and we retreat into self-protection.

On the other hand, we're convinced that when
human beings are supported in building their own capacities as creative problem-solvers,
when they feel secure in their own efficacy, they will be much less likely to
be whiners and blamers. They will not give up their self-interest, but they will
be much better able to see their well-being connected to the well-being of others.
This is not an act of blind faith on our part, we are seeing this phenomenon emerging
in communities across the country. It is what we think of as the basic democratic
faith.

This democratic faith is not that we are all
inherently good, but that we are inherently social creatures, who for the most
part want to live in healthy communities. So as educators we don't have to teach
others to want the good, as much as we have to help them learn that they can create
the good, achieve the good, that it is even possible. We believe that this is
the challenge to educators living in a culture of powerlessness.

How Do We Help Create Powerful People?

Now back to the core question here, as educators:
what do people need to become powerful? To make a difference in today's highly
complex and inter-related world, what do people need?

Our answer at the Center for Living Democracy
can be summed up this way: What's needed is the capacity to build successful public
relationships, relationships characterized by mutual accountability toward goals
commonly arrived at. A big mouthful! I'll repeat: What's needed to go beyond the
culture of powerlessness is a capacity to build successful public relationships,
relationships characterized by mutual accountability toward goals commonly arrived
at.

Now before I explain what the implications
are, maybe I'd better explain what I mean by public relationships, because it's
not entirely clear. Sometimes when we talk about public life, people think, "oh
public life, that's what celebrities have, that's what politicians have." Somebody
said to us once, well, public life‹that's what you go into when you want your
private sexual life to be fully investigated!

We must explain what we mean by public relationships.
We mean relationships outside of our families and personal friendships. We mean
relationships with peers, teachers, administrators at school, with bosses, co-workers,
with professionals in relation to, health, human services, media, and more. We
mean with neighbors and fellow citizens and public officials within our community.
We mean all the public roles we play each day as we step outside our homes.

In all of these public relationships, our actions
affect, shape the commons. Even if we're passive in these roles, we shape the
commons. We are actors, even if we're passive actors. We are shaping the larger
world. So now if our challenge as educators is fundamentally to facilitate the
development of powerful people, and we're defining the "how-to" of such power
as the capacity to build successful public relationships of mutual accountability,
what's the implication for teachers?

First, to recognize that public relationships
aren't what students have when they graduate, aren't what students have in some
far-off distant future, but what students have every day when they come to school.
School is their public life, and it is our public life as educators as we encounter
our peers and our students.

Another implication is that indeed students
have a life outside the school. Within the larger community, they can play an
important public role in creating effective public relationships capable of solving
very real problems.

Stories of Students Learning to Build Power
to Solve Problems Through Effective Public Relationships

So let me just give you a couple of stories
from the people that we are meeting around the country who embody these lessons.
Maybe they wouldn't use this language, but they embody for us what we're talking
about here, in terms of addressing the culture of powerlessness by enabling students
to build effective public relationships, not for the future but here and now.

We talked to Alan Hashvitz who is a teacher
many of you might have heard of. We interviewed him for our recent newsletter.
He's a controversial fellow, but I think he has something to teach all of us about
education. He's a middle school teacher in a town near L.A. in a multicultural
school. He teaches social studies, and when he began there, the test scores in
social studies were quite low, I think they ranked in the 23rd percentile for
the state of California.

Alan has a distinctive approach, recognizing
that among the most important relationships a young person has are to their peers.
The entire classroom experience is structured in terms of creating relationships
of mutual accountability among peers.

So all of Alan's students every day of their
school experience are functioning in mixed teams of girls and boys and they are
responsible for setting team targets in terms of the grades that they will aim
for. They work and sign contracts to hold each other accountable to those goals
that they set, depending on each student's own desires. Each day they sign contracts
about what homework they will do and they report to each other about what they
have accomplished the night before.

These practices begin to create an atmosphere,
not just of accountability to the teacher, but accountability to one another.
And the students talk about the different feeling that creates for them, knowing
their peers are counting on them. It's different than simply pleasing an authority
figure. A very important aspect of Alan's teaching involves students in the larger
world, but let me hold off on that for just a minute. I want to talk about a school-wide
example that we use in our book, The Quickening of America. It's perhaps the most
instructive in our chapter about education.

It is about a school in Ithaca, New York, that
has been in existence for almost two decades. When it began, it was quite marginal,
experimental. It's a public school, but its program was considered off the edge
of respectability. Now, because it has been so incredibly successful, there are
long waiting lists and the principal is a sought-after advisor to other schools.
The heart of this school's success, for us, is that the young people in this high
school are learning how to achieve effective public relationships every single
day of their schooling experience.

We mean that the entire school is run as a
consensus democracy. Each week, students and faculty meet to decide on school
policy. There's a committee structure in which it's very clear how you bring policy
questions to the body as a whole. There's tremendous opportunity for deliberation.
And in the classroom the young people are encouraged set the goals for their courses.
They sit on committees to evaluate teachers, and there's never been one violation
of confidentiality in this sensitive role. They resolve conflicts in the school
through a committee procedure. And they run their own cafeteria.

Very interestingly, the week that we visited,
the students had just voted to raise their own high school graduation requirement
above the state mandate. We said, "what, are you crazy? Kids don't make it harder
for themselves!" And they said "well wait, this is our school, we want it to be
a cut above. Of course we'll raise our own graduation requirement because we want
to make our school the best."

What we're suggesting here is that this schools
is creating a culture of democracy that goes beyond any specific rules or procedures.
These young people are learning how to create effective public relationships to
realize mutually arrived-at goals.

To give you a couple more examples: Schaeffer
Elementary School in Tappan, New York. Kids here sit on a due process board that
issues opinions about fairness regarding treatment of other children. They hear
complaints. Now remember these are elementary school children.

When a child named Raymond was caught drawing
swastikas on the books of Jewish students, he went before the due process board.
He couldn't explain why he was drawing swastikas, and so the board decided the
only reason someone would do such a thing is because he or she didn't understand
what Nazism was about. They got Raymond together with a young person whose grandparents
had been killed in the Holocaust, and he taught his fellow student about Nazism.
Months later, when a first grader drew a swastika, it was Raymond who was asked
to come in and help explain the meaning of swastikas.

What we're saying is that young people of any
age can be involved constructively in developing what we think of as the arts
of democracy, the skills that are required to achieve effective public relationships
to solve real problems.

Learning the Arts of Democracy

I found myself sympathizing with Doug when
he talked about his struggle to name this Center, because originally Paul and
I had named ours, the Institute for the Arts of Democracy. We chose this name
because we believe that learning the democratic arts is so central to everything
we're talking about. Democracy is not something we're born knowing; we have to
learn these skills.

So we called ourselves the Institute for the
Arts of Democracy. The problem was that we got letters from foundations saying,
"sorry, we don't fund the Arts!" And we once had a medical emergency far from
home in which Paul had to fill out a patient history. We got back to California
after this ordeal and looked at doctor's write-up about him. It said, the patient
is an artist. They just didn't get it!

So now we call ourselves the Center for Living
Democracy. But the point is that central to what can make democracy come alive,
and function well to promote life, is the practice of the arts of democracy. In
our book The Quickening of America we talk about ten of them.

Certainly these young people in Tappan, New
York, these elementary school kids, would have to be practicing many of those
that we talk about in our book‹from creative conflict to active listening, from
negotiation and mediation to mentoring and evaluation, and more. These youngsters
would have to be learning creative conflict as they dealt with this issue of the
swastika and practicing mediation among those who felt aggrieved. Negotiation
would be needed to come up with a best solution. They would have to use their
imagination in public dialogue to work through the issues. And, certainly, they
have to learn to evaluate and reflect on what they're doing. These are all the
key skills that make democratically work, whether in a school or in a community.

We also suggest that at the same time that
students are learning effective public relationships within their school settings,
and practicing these arts of democracy, that students can create relationships
in the community to make a difference. As the Institute for Democracy in Education
puts it, students can make a difference now, not in some far-off distant future.
That is very much the theme of the Institute for Democracy in Education. I'm sure
many of you are familiar with that organization.

In fact, students can be engaged in real problem
solving. Marvin Rosenbaum in Maine is a founder of the Kids' Consortium. He advocates
that we learn to see "town as text." Students in the Kids Consortium are going
well beyond what might be thought of as community service‹ simply plugging into
a slot that has been pre-arranged by an adult to do something that some adult
needs to have done (and calling it community service.) In the Kids Consortium
young people are encouraged to act on their own interests, and engage in direct
problem-solving in their communities.

One of the most interesting stories that highlights
such possibilities for us comes from a group of sixth graders in Amesville, Ohio,
where there was a toxic spill in the town creek several years ago. These sixth
graders heard about it and told their teacher they didn't trust the EPA to clean
it up! So, they constituted themselves the Sixth Grade Amesville Water Chemists.

Imagine the type of educator who would have
had have been in that classroom to support these young people in having confidence
in themselves that they could in fact become the Sixth Grade Amesville Water Chemists.
It meant that they had to learn certain political skills because they had to raise
the money to buy the chemistry sets they needed to do the work. They had to have
the skills to negotiate with their parents because they had to spend weekends
going to the creek to take water samples. They had to learn, of course, a great
deal about ecology and chemistry, but they had to learn about one another. They
told us there was one girl who didn't want to go along with anything, so they
had to learn how to deal with her. In what we think of it as strategic planning,
they told us that they learned that they had to put one smart kid on each team!

And these young people did it. In fact, they
were so successful that after this project, they then made themselves available
to any family in the community who wanted their well water tested. They became
a community resource.

Recall my earlier comments about the widespread
feelings of powerless. Then think of what this experience did for these youngsters.
What a contrast. Let me just read to you a paragraph from one of the 6th graders
who participated. Hear the joy and confidence in his voice.

"We think what we are doing is important
and fun. The importance of this project is to let people know what pollutants
are in the water. The fun is that we know we are helping others. You may think
we're too young. Well, we are young, but we are trying our very best, and it works.
So put your trust in us."

What we're suggesting also is that once this
genie of belief in self, and confidence that one can act effectively on one's
values in the public world, once that the genie is out, it cannot be put back
in the bottle.

When these children entered the eighth grade,
they were very upset that the cafeteria used plastic utensils. These were very
environmentally sensitive young people by that time. So they went to the principal
and said "We don't think it's a good idea to use plastic utensils, it's not environmentally
sound." The principal said, "Well, it's too much trouble, thank you very much
but we can't change." They tried again, made their case stronger, built up the
facts, went in, and still didn't get anywhere. This principal was not as smart
as he could have been.

These young people then decided to boycott
the cafeteria. They boycotted the cafeteria and got all their friends to do the
same, and finally the principal said, "Okay, we'll figure out what it takes to
get metal utensils." Then, the most striking thing: These young people went in
to the principal and said, "Look, we know that this boycott cost the school some
money, and we want you to tell us how much because we're willing to put on a bake
sale and have a car wash in order that we can pay back the school, because it's
our school."

So this story begins to capture for me the
sense of how one can transcend the culture of powerlessness. And with a sense
of power comes, as we see here, a sense of responsibility for the consequences
of one's actions.

One particular resource in this same mode is
the organization based in Maine that I mentioned before. It's The Kids' Consortium,
and it's now spread to five states with a project called kids as planners, which
captures much of the spirit of what we're talking about. Its founder, Marvin Rosenbaum,
believes that young people not only can become tremendous resources in their communities
but it is absolutely essential for their own growth to experience their own efficacy
in order to become the people that our world so desperately needs.

Kids as Planners is a rich resource. It's projects
have included encouraging young people in one class to learn how to decode satellite
photographs of their town‹plotting out what each color and photograph means‹and
then taking that to the town planning commission. As Marvin Rosenbaum put it,
a young person walking into a planning meeting with that kind of data is making
a major contribution to the town and saving the town tremendous expense. At the
same time, generating a powerful sense of their own capacity to contribute to
positive change.

Here's another example of how this approach
can manifest: Second graders in a small town in Maine. There is a bird sanctuary
in their town, and the community is aware that none of the elders in their community
take advantage of the beauty of this bird sanctuary. The second graders are encouraged
to go to the nursing homes and go to places where elderly gather and interview
them about what would enable them to take advantage of the bird sanctuary. These
second graders, after they have the answers, come back into the classroom and
work with a designer to come up with what additional structures would be necessary
to enable the elderly to participate.

They came up with a plan. Then these second
graders took their design to the building-trades class in the high school and
worked with these high schoolers in creating an observation deck to enable the
old people to enjoy the town in a new way. Again, the possibility of effective
public relationships built by practicing the arts of democracy.

We think of the first art of democracy as listening.
And certainly these youngsters had to do what well. I'm sure they had to do a
lot of negotiating as they came to terms with what was practical to do and what
the high schoolers wanted to build.

A final example in terms of the education to
create powerful people who know how to achieve effective public relationships
comes from Florida. In Fort Myers, Florida an environmental seminar for high school
students has gone on for twenty years. It includes some of the brightest kids
in the school and some of the most troubled kids, those having a difficult time.

Over two decades, they have evolved a program
in which these young people saved a 2,500-acre cypress stand from being destroyed.
They learned what they had to know to bring the issue before the electorate and
get a positive vote. That took a tremendous amount of listening and talking and
gaining support for their goal. Then, after they achieved the protection for this
swamp, they learned that they had to develop a master plan for its maintenance‹because
the parks department was understaffed. They became sort of a technical assistance
arm to the parks department.

Again, young people are learning that they
can make a difference now, not in some far off distant future. This environmental
seminar‹called the Monday Group‹developed what they called the Ten Commandments.
All of these guidelines the young people created are about how to create effective
public relationships, relationships of mutual accountability toward commonly-arrived
at goals.

One of these commandments is their version
of recycling. It's not materials recycling, it's about energy recycling. The notion
is that if you set out to achieve something you truly believe in and you fail,
you can't blame someone else. Recycling means that you don't stereotype and say,
"Oh, it was the evil developer or the corrupt politician." You look at the process
that you have been engaged in and you examine every step along the way.

You recycle, asking: Where did I not listen
enough to the concern of that person? Where did I not have enough knowledge to
back up my point? You recycle and you go back and try again. These Ten Commandments
of the Monday group are a beautiful formulation of a version of what we think
of the Arts of Democracy.

So what we're saying, then, is that education
must, in its very practice, build the individual's sense of efficacy in the larger
world. Not learning just about democracy, but learning that democracy is what
we do every day. Learning that democracy is not what is done for us, or done to
us, but what we ourselves do daily. Its not what we prepare for when we're adults;
it's how we interact with our peers and our superiors today. We hope these examples
offer hints of what that understanding can mean.

Making Visible to Young People Models of
Powerful People, Examples of Hope

But what I've been saying is not nearly enough.
For young people to believe that they can become powerful, they have to see adults
in the larger world who are powerful. Here, we do not mean celebrities, or the
politicians and CEO's they might see on Channel One.

We mean that it's inconceivable that young
people can escape the widespread cultural powerlessness themselves, if the only
people with power they see are in fact the heads of corporations, politicians,
and celebrities. Moreover, they won't believe that they can become effective social
beings if they only see superheros, the exceptional person who saved a life somewhere,
the Mother Theresa among us. That person is always going to be the Other among
us.

I think one of the greatest challenges that
we all have as educators is overcoming the tragic dearth of information, of stories,
about ordinary people who are achieving the kind of power that I'm talking about
this morning‹creative power, social power, capacity-building in the best sense.
Those stories just aren't out there for people to see.

We get comment after comment from people who
look at our book and say, "I never knew this." I had to try not to laugh, we were
sitting in Washington, D.C. during our book tour, talking with a writer for a
business magazine and she said, "I went to Harvard... and I never heard about
anything of this!" I tried to keep a straight face.

The point is, whether we've been to Harvard
or not, it's hard to learn about the incredible numbers of people who are breaking
through the culture of powerlessness. In the midst of widespread feelings of powerlessness,
we also see what we think of as a quiet turnaround, a "quickening." Quickening
means the first stirrings of life when a woman is pregnant and she feels the fetus
moves. She knows there's new life in her. We believe that there may be a quickening
in America, a quickening in the practice of democracy‹as more and more ordinary
people discover that they can, not just run from power or blame power, but become
powerful.

We have to enable young people and ourselves
to learn about this quickening. How? How many young people get to learn about,
for example, the ACORN organization? 100,000 strong across this country, people
of color, low income people of color who have successfully taken on the banking
industry. One professor of finance said he believed these folks had learned more
about financing in low-income communities than any professor of finance knows.
They have brought, through their work, $35 billion in investments back into their
communities that would gone elsewhere without organizations like Acorn.

How many people know that representatives of
Acorn actually get to sit down with Alan Greenspan, actually have monthly meetings
with Henry Cisneros at HUD? That's not on the front page of the paper, and yet
Henry Cisneros thinks this organization is so important, he has it on his schedule
every month.

How many people have heard of the Industrial
Areas Foundation? It a network of citizens, which now boasts forty-five community-based
organizations across this country with 1 million families. Most of the affiliates
are church-based, their actions in the community flowing from their religious
faith. Many of these are not the least bit marginal. In a city like San Antonio,
for example, these faith-based organizations came together to do things as important
as completely revamping the job training system for the entire city.

In Memphis, Tennessee, they designed a school
reform from the bottom-up‹blacks and whites coming together. They held 435 house
meetings over two years, bringing blacks and whites together to ask, "What kind
of schools do we want for our young people?" Out of this very intense dialogue
came a school reform that parents and community members were willing to implement
because they helped design it, and it is going forward.

But how many have ever heard of this? We only
hear of racial division and poverty in Memphis.

Or how many young people know, for example,
that more and more workers are gaining some ownership of the companies in which
they work? Not many of us are aware that in four major industries, worker-owned
businesses now rank in the top ten. How many of us have ever heard of that? Or
that 21 percent of publicly-traded companies today have significant employee ownership.

Employee-ownership doesn't always mean a greater
voice, but it is a beginning. These worker-owned businesses are outperforming
their competitors, because ownership contributes to creating a sense of personal
responsibility for success.

Or how many know about the spread of community
policing? What is community policing? At its best, it is a great deal of direction
and shaping of what policing means on the part of the community itself. In my
home town, Fort Worth, Texas, a community policing program‹very much based in
the neighborhoods of Fort Worth‹has reduced the crime rate by 30 percent in three
years. Ordinary citizens are doing this, overcoming their sense of powerlessness.

Or how many know that there are visioning processes
spreading throughout this country where citizens come together to envision what
they want their city to look like ten or fifteen years down the road? How many
people know that in Chattanooga, Tennessee people began this process in 1984?
Chattanooga was going downhill, with tremendous racial division, and flight by
major corporations out of that city. It was a very depressed community, with very
little hope among the townspeople.

Then they came together in a visioning process
that has resulted in a renewal that is visible and it is deep‹a renewal that has
brought hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into riverfront park, a
new recycling program, new affordable housing initiatives, a battered women's
shelter, a new aquarium...a new city.

It began with ordinary citizens coming together
and saying this is what we want Chattanooga to look like.

In other words, these are the images, this
is the information, these are the stories, we need to bring into our classrooms,
bring into our daily lives to help young people and adults alike overcome our
feelings of powerlessness. But how? Certainly one of the goals for the Center
for Living Democracy is to make the invisible visible, because that certainly
is the only way that we can begin to penetrate the culture of powerlessness.

Teachers and Power: The Image of Power Our
Own Actions Present

Finally, of course, students' most immediate
model of power or powerlessness in the adult world is not only their parents but
also their teachers. It is impossible for any of us to be enabling and creating
more powerful people as we want our students to become, if we ourselves feel powerless.
Sadly, and understandably, there's tremendous evidence that many teachers in our
society feel very powerless.

It's not surprising that the most significant
school reform in the eyes of teachers, according to a recent study, has nothing
to do with what we read in the papers about vouchers and national standards. The
most significant reform is school-based management, because at least in some districts
teachers see themselves as gaining more power as responsibility is devolved >from
a central school administration into the hands of teachers, principals, and parents.

Now the source of their power‹to return to
the fundamental theme of my talk‹is not just teachers gaining more "say," more
of a place in the decision-making process, in any simple sense. What I am talking
about is democratic restructuring of schools that allow teachers more opportunities
to develop effective public relationships. We see teachers breaking out of their
own feeling of powerlessness by developing effective public relationships.

Back to my hometown in Fort Worth. There we
talked to teachers and a principal in one elementary school. Its test scores placed
it in the bottom quintile citywide. They were desperate. The kids almost all came
from poverty-stricken families. The school experienced a lot of violence. Virtually
no parents were involved.

In their desperation, they decided to start
building relationships with parents‹meaning they had to go out into the homes
of their students, sit and listen to the parents' concerns and really welcome
the parents in active relationships. The parents were not uncaring or apathetic.
It turned out that they had been intimidated by the school. Once the teachers
reached out, they became involved. They began to volunteer in the school. And
in just a couple of years, this school moved from the bottom to the top quintile
in test scores.

This gives a hint of the opportunities that
are before us, as we think of building power through building effective public
relationships.

As educators we gain power not simply by structural
reform, but by learning the arts of listening and negotiation and evaluation...these
arts of democracy.

Concluding Thoughts

I began with several observations that shape
our life's work, Paul's and mine. I began with a contrast‹the vast material power
of our society on the one hand, and the pervasive feelings of powerlessness, on
the other. I also noted that the very nature of today's problems means they can't
be solved except through a vast increase in public engagement, breaking through
those feelings of powerlessness. Solutions depend on the creativity, the buy-in,
that only comes when people know that they've had a part in creating those solutions
to begin with.

In such an era, I have said that the challenge
to educators is less to create "better" people. Most of us are decent, it's just
that we feel we have no way to manifest our decency! In such an era the primary
challenge to educators is to enable effective people, helping people master the
arts of effective relationships in their lives now, not in some distant future.

I also suggested that we are not starting from
scratch in this process of democratic renewal. That's what we mean by the "quickening."
There is a bottom-up turnaround occurring. It is remaking expectations of what
ordinary people have to contribute to problem-solving in every arena of our public
lives.

I hinted at a few of signs of this quickening‹in
the workplace and in communities‹and there are certainly many others, as we chronicle
in our book. Our challenge as educators is to enable students to perceive this
quickening of democracy, and their own rewarding role in it. We must make it visible
through stories of ordinary people participating effectively in public problem
solving.

Shifting my metaphor drastically: We must communicate
that they don't have to start the train moving; they have to learn how to board
it, provide fuel for the engine. And in so doing enjoy those rewards of self development.

In so doing, we teach hope. Fundamentally,
we believe that hope is the most powerful antidote to powerlessness, and hope
is what is missing. We don't acquire hope by wishing for it; we acquire it through
action, as I trust my stories of real people have communicated.

I'd like to end with a short poem that hangs
in my office at home that captures this message or me. It's by a Chinese poet
in 1921 who wrote:

Hope cannot be said to exist
Nor can it be said not to exist.
For it is like the roads that cross the earth.
In the beginning, there were no roads,
But when many people pass one way
A road is made.

Thank you very much.

Source: This speech was emailed to Gifts of Speech by Ms. Lappé on June 9, 1998.